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End of Work, Complete Automation, Robotic Anarcho-Communism

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End of Work, Complete Automation, Robotic Anarcho-Communism It’s the End of Work as We Know It: End Of Work, Complete Automation, Robotic Anarcho-Communism Pierpaolo Marrone † [email protected] ABSTRACT In this article I explore some consequences of the relations between technique, capitalism and radical liberation ideologies (such as communism and anarcho- communism). My thesis is that the latter are going to rise to the extent that wage labor will become a scarce commodity. Through total automation, however, what may occur will not be the end of the reign of scarcity, but a new oppressive order. It is sometimes said that the end of the so-called ethical parties in the West was the consequence of the end of ideologies (Lepre, 2006). The alleged end of ideologies (Fukuyama, 2003) would have produced two relevant consequences: 1) the decline of politics, replaced by the economy; 2) the end of any utopian inspiration, which would have been rendered impossible by the dominance of the technique, since this would represent the universal affirmation of instrumental rationality (the one that Weber called "steel cage"; Weber, 1971). It is, in any case, a fact that ethical parties, which proposed complex alternative visions of the world, have disappeared, perhaps because they corresponded to a Fordist work organization, based on production and not consumption (Boltanski & Chiapello, 1999) . It is not at all obvious, however, that the end of ideologies really did exist. Just as it is not obvious - and it will be the thesis that I will try to explore in this paper - that the spirit of utopia cannot rise again and perhaps it has never gone away, together with its hopes and its dangers. That decline and that end would have been epitomized by the triumph of capitalism on a global scale. Indeed, to say globalization means precisely that a single system of production and distribution of goods has established itself as an economic system valid for all and not contested by anyone (Tremonti, 2016; † Università di Trieste, Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici, Italy. HUMANA.MENTE Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2020, 13, 37, 1–18 ISSN: 1972-1293 2 Humana.Mente – Issue 37 Magatti, 2009). Suffice it to say that outside of capitalism only Cuba and North Korea now remain. The procedures that define the use of goods in the most remote Chinese industrial district are now the same as those used in advanced industrial areas (Magatti, 2009). About capitalism it has been said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than its disappearance (Fischer, 2009). This idea indicates that many of us think of capitalism as an aspect of nature - as much as it would realize the supposed natural essence of homo economicus - and not as a historical product among others that, like all historical phenomena, has its own cycle that develops from the early stages to maturity, to decline, to disappearance (Pareto 2006; Kirchgässner 2010). It is banal to say that there is a profound harmony between the development of technology and capitalism. It is not at all trivial, instead, and indeed it is very debatable, to think that there is an analytical link between technique and capitalism (just as, obviously, there is no analytical link between capitalism and western democracy). Some deny that this link exists (Severino 2011) and imagine that the technique, that is the predominance of instrumental reason, and capitalism can be forces that will simply diverge at a certain moment, making possible a gap of human history towards other social orders (socialist , or communist, or anarchist, or anarchist-communist?) Those who believe instead that there is a link between technology and capitalism could qualify this idea of their inevitable divergence as a simple and visionary prodrome to questionable and faded utopian visions (Bartolini, 2019 Consigliere 2019). In my opinion, this, however, is a rather generic criticism which must be specified, although it is not unfounded at all. This critique usually builds on the recent historical decline of alternative visions of capitalism, such as those conveyed by Eastern European countries or large socialist or communist minorities within Western societies. This competitive struggle between radically alternative different visions of the world would have definitely ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Empire. But what is not said is the profound solidarity that exists between the ideology of technology, capitalism and communism. This solidarity is manifested precisely in the foundations, that is, in the idea that it is possible to overcome the reign of scarcity (Demichelis, 2017; Severino, 2011). This overcoming is possible by adapting reality to the idea, as Hegel would have said, that is, more prosaically, conceiving the world within an imaginative matrix (Ackerman, 2014), which can be the steel cage of rationality, the reduction of It’s the End of Work as We Know It 3 everything to goods, or the egalitarian efficiency of planned production. These three visions are naturally utopian, that is, they use imaginative tools for political purposes for creating an order (Galli, 2019) - which is simply the function of politics -. The asymptotic realization of the first two utopias is simply globalization, which is so much the global extension of instrumental rationality, epitomized by the kilometers of optic fiber that travel the globe and which promise to arrive soon even in the most remote Andean village, how much, and really for this reason, a global access to all goods in any part of the world and the institutionalization of these practices at an international level (Drori, Meyer, Hwang, 2006). And what happened to all the antagonistic social utopias? Believing that they are irretrievably waning is an act of superficiality for several reasons (Tronti, 2013). First of all for an eschatological reason. The idea of the end of scarcity and equal access to both essential goods and the superfluous (“bread and roses”, according to the lyric expression of Marx, where it seems to be clear what bread is - the primary needs - but it is not at all clear what roses are - the desires that each of us cultivates within the confines of our mind and that finally come true? - is the secularized re-proposition of the Edenic myth, where the eschaton is placed inside of a progressive movement that manifests itself as the destiny of humanity. Secondly, because communism shares the trust of technology and capitalism to leave the realm of needs and enter the realm of desire expansion (Hardt, Negri, 2002). Is it saying that communism, momentarily defeated by history, survives in capitalism itself? No, of course and rather: communist or, more precisely, anarcomunist forms of reflection can rise again in the utopia of the end of work and the end of scarcity. In fact, the end of work is one of the versions of the end of scarcity, heralded by the rejection of work (Negri, 2012). Capitalism owes its success to many factors, among which psychological mechanisms do not seem to have to be considered among the relevant ones. Indeed, we can certainly collectively decide to be more productive than our predecessors have been, but this in no way assures us an increase in economic growth rates. What instead explains the success of capitalism is a change in the social relations of ownership, which overwhelm individual psychological intentions. In fact, in pre-capitalist systems everyone is potentially a producer who has direct access to the means of production and subsistence, but in these systems survival does not depend on a structural way regarding the efficiency of the process of production of the goods. A harvest can be very good one year and 4 Humana.Mente – Issue 37 very bad another year; however, these are non-systematic and contingent constraints on social reproduction processes. The capitalist mode of production, which communism sees as inefficient and therefore antagonistic, although this antagonism is the premise of its realization, frees the economic agents from the direct production of the means of subsistence. To access these means of subsistence, the economic agents must turn to the market. The market has existed at least since cities of a certain size existed, but it is only with capitalism that dependence on the market becomes general and tendentially universal. Since the economic agent no longer coincides with the producer of the means of subsistence, everyone must have the universal means of exchange (money) to access these goods. Since everyone has to turn to the market, this very fact generates competitive pressure among the producers to which they try to respond in various ways: hoarding of goods, monopoly cartels, dumping practices, customer retention, process innovation, product innovation. The most effective medium-term means of selling goods and facing competitive pressure in the absence of monopolies (which globalization contrasts (Sharzer, 2012)) is naturally technological innovation. Technological innovation has a direct influence on the dynamics of commodity prices, which tend to approach asymptotically the cost of production (Rifkin, 2012). Profits among competitors also tend to become equal. The logic of accumulation can therefore be sustained only by untiring innovation. This is why we are obsessed by growth rates, because low indices are elements of crisis, even of the existential state of entire nations. And we are obsessed by the low indices of our growth because these meet the idea that capitalist development, at least in what were called affluent countries, is reaching its full maturity. New technologies create and emerge from new forms of work organization: labor markets are restructured creating new professions, destroying old ones, proletarizing skills that were once highly valued (as happens for many intellectual professions). Work is naturally a commodity like any other, and for this reason the appeals that are still seldom heard, more and more rarely now, to the dignity of work are a mixture of pathetic and reactionary posture.
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